Ethnic quotas for Police

! This post hasn't been updated in over a year. A lot can change in a year including my opinion and the amount of naughty words I use. There's a good chance that there's something in what's written below that someone will find objectionable. That's fine, if I tried to please everybody all of the time then I'd be a Lib Dem (remember them?) and I'm certainly not one of those. The point is, I'm not the kind of person to try and alter history in case I said something in the past that someone can use against me in the future but just remember that the person I was then isn't the person I am now nor the person I'll be in a year's time.

I was making the kids lunches this morning half-watching BBC Breakfast and they had a Sikh and a black guy on the sofa talking about the police.

I turned it up expecting to hear some claptrap about how the police are institutionally racist for picking on the minority groups responsible for the largest proportion of violent crime per capita but it was something else this time.

It started off ok with the Sikh guy quite happy to accept that he had been refused a job with the police because he failed one of the tests – a former colleague of mine applied 3 times before passing all the tests. Then the black guy, the chairman of the Black Police Officers Association or some such organisation, started calling for quotas to be introduced because only 7% of police officers come from black and ethnic minorities.

He doesn’t appear to have contemplated the possibility that black and ethnic minority people don’t want to join the police, an oversight that seems to have extended to the BBC who never seem to think of asking that question.

The black guy went on to say that in areas where there are a lot of black and ethnic minority people they need more minority officers because they can understand the culture and language better than white officers. At this point the Sikh sitting next to him asked him if he was advocating black people being policed by black people and white people policed by white people. He didn’t get a chance to answer because they conveniently ran out of time but that seems to be what he’s asking for.

So what do you think? Should quotas be applied to artificially bump up the number of minority police officers? Should black and asian people be policed primarily by black and asian officers?